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The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 is almost certainly going to be unveiled at the Samsung Unpacked virtual product launch event on August 5, but there are still several things we don’t know about the Android phone. 

Samsung has traditionally releases its stylus-packing phones in August, and it always seems to incorporate the features introduced in that year’s S-series phones from six months prior. But there’s still plenty to wonder about the Note 20. 

Will the Note 20 pack all of the Samsung Galaxy S20's cameras and specs? Will it be as big, or bigger, than the Galaxy S20 Plus? Will there be a top-specced Note 20 Ultra model?

Then there are all the other Note-specific questions we have for the next phone in the stylus line: will there be more features for the S Pen? Will the display be even bigger than last year’s models? Will productivity tools like DeX get improvements, too?

We’ve still got plenty of questions, but we’re going to narrow them down to the five biggest things we still don’t know about the next flagship Samsung phone line.

(Image credit: Future)

Will there be a Note 20 Ultra in addition to a Note 20 Plus?

Perhaps the biggest question is whether we’ll see a Note 20 corollary to the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra with an appropriately huge screen and extreme specs. 

At this point, it’s hard to be certain – heck, early rumors strongly suggested we might not even see a Note 20 Ultra. Given we’ve seen more and more leaked images of the supposed extra-large model, we suspect that rumors we initially assumed referred to the Note 20 Plus were, instead, about the Note 20 Ultra – especially since a recent specs leak referred to just the base and Ultra models, with no mention of the Plus.

We could still see a Plus model, but Samsung might be splitting the difference and dividing its choices between a smaller, more basic model and a max-specced Ultra version.

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Will the Note 20 come in a 4G version, too?

Given most 2020 flagship phones support 5G, we’re expecting the Note 20 line to follow suit – especially since it will most likely pack the leading Snapdragon 865 or 865 Plus chipset, which require a discrete 5G modem. But given the nominal price bump we’ve seen to get 5G phone connectivity, is there a cheaper 4G-only Note 20 phone in the works?

We’ve seen pricing leaks that deliberately call out a 4G version – and recent certifications from US and Thailand regulatory agencies (FCC and NBTC, respectively) have surfaced revealing a 4G-only device is at least registered in those markets. Whether they’ll end up coming to more regions is another question, as phonemakers don’t always release all variants of their phones globally – or might wait some time to do so, like with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Lite.

(Image credit: Future)

Will it have all the S20's cameras? Or have even more advanced tech?

The Galaxy S20 line has a well-rounded suite of rear cameras, with a main 12MP f/1.8 shooter, 64MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera, along with 8K at 24fps video recording and its new Super Stabilization feature. The S20 Ultra even packed a 108MP main camera, which enabled its staggering 100x ‘Space Zoom’ feature.

Is all that coming to the Note 20 line? Hard to say: leaks claim that the Plus or Ultra will have a 108MP main, 12MP ultra-wide, and 13MP telephoto lens with periscope tech, though another rumor suggests it won’t reach the 100x maximum zoom of the S20 Ultra. Instead, expect a more modest 50x zoom, but it’s unclear whether this will come to both the standard Note 20 and the Ultra.

What’s more interesting is that the Note 20’s selfie camera could ditch the punch-hole for an under-display camera, according to rumor and even a video tease by Samsung itself. While it could be a pop-up camera, that’s not really Samsung’s style (not outside of the Samsung Galaxy A80’s pop-and-flip cameras, anyway). But again, will such a prestigious feature come to both the standard Note 20 and its pricier sibling?

(Image credit: Future | Amit Mishra for TechRadar India)

What about the Note 20 chipset and specs?

We’re still not certain about the Note 20’s set of specs: given the line’s productivity focus, we expect more battery but not exactly show-stopping internals. 

Some rumors presume the Note 20 will get the same Snapdragon 865 chipset as the Galaxy S20 line, while a leaker believes it will instead opt for the slightly more powerful Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset instead. While the Note 10 and Note 10 Plus didn’t upgrade its processor over the Galaxy S10 (both go the Snapdragon 855), including one would give the Note 20 an edge to compete with other mid-year flagships that have launched with the Snapdragon 865 Plus, like the Asus ROG 3.

Outside the US, we’ve heard the Note 20 will get Samsung’s Exynos 992 chipset, which would be a slight upgrade on the Exynos 990 appearing in the Galaxy S20 line, though another leak suggests the new phone could just stick with the Exynos 990, too. We love conflicting rumors!

The rest of the Note 20 specs are even less known, with one source claiming a baseline 128GB of storage, while that Exynos 990 leak also suggests the phones will come with 12GB of RAM. 

There’s been more chatter about Note 20 battery life, though, with estimations from a minimum of 4,000mAh capacity in the standard Note 20, a more recent leak suggesting 4,300mAh, and up to 4,500mAh in the Note 20 Plus/Ultra. At least we have a range.

(Image credit: Future)

Will there be more S Pen gestures and productivity software?

Sadly, there’s even less we know about improvements that might come for the Note 20’s signature feature, the S Pen stylus. 

We have heard rumors that you’ll be able to use the S Pen as a more proper pointer with mid-air gestures allowing navigation around the interface, which could iterate on some similar (and rather clumsy) way to get around with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 S Pen.

What’s more exciting for the productivity-minded user: DeX, the Samsung feature that used its smartphones and tablets to power a desktop-computing experience through an external monitor, may finally be going wireless. Instead of requiring a dedicated dock and/or cord, you may be able to fire up the PC experience (with a Windows-like file system) wirelessly, according to this rumor. 

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Storage startup Pliops has announced sampling of its Storage Processors to select tier-one cloud and enterprise companies and was on track to start commercial production of the processors later in 2020. 

The Storage Processors ASICs are said to increase performance of NAND flash storage solutions, such as SSDs, by over 10 times and also decrease latency by up to 1000 times in various database applications. 

“As the success of GPUs and AI processors has shown, there is a pressing need for specialized solutions that accelerate the pace of workflows,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer for Pliops. “Because data growth is absolutely booming at a time when storage and data processing is slowing, now is the time to take this approach and apply it to mainstream workloads like unstructured and structured databases, analytics and virtually any application that uses flash storage.”

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Storage Processor

The concept of Pliops’ Storage Processor (PSP) relies on software and hardware. The software layer consists of an NVMe driver as well as a Pliops Kernel Module that replace traditional storage engines thus removing ‘layers of the database, file, block, and storage management accumulated over decades by legacy architectures’ and eliminating bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, the ASICs designed to accelerate processing of data-intensive workloads (such as databases) offloads processing of compute-intensive functions from CPUs while using a fraction of power that a general-purpose processors need to perform the same tasks, the company said. 

(Image credit: Pliops)

Applications accelerated by Pliops include MySQL, MariaDB, mongoDB, Redis, Oracle, Apache Spark, and Cassandra. The company emphasizes that deployment of its Storage Processor is relatively easy and does not require changes to ‘most’ programs that are in use today. 

According to Pliops, increasing performance using its Storage Processors can reduce expenditures on CPUs and SSDs and even make lower-cost 3D QLC NAND-based drives viable for mainstream workloads. Furthermore, PSPs can also reduce power consumption of servers and datacenters. Reduction of hardware and power costs naturally lower overall costs and greatly increase value of solid-state storage. 

Pliops has raised money from various companies and venture capital firms, including Intel Capital, Mellanox, Western Digital, Xilinx, SoftBank, Somv, and Viola Ventures.

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Source: Pliops

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The NASA Mars Perseverance Rover has successfully launched – and it's carrying a record number of cameras to help it hunt for signs of life on the red planet.

The six-wheeled robot, which is the successor to the Mars Curiosity Rover, took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and is expected to touch down on the surface of Mars on 18 February 2021.

Its younger sibling landed on Mars in August 2012 and remains there, investigating to this day, living off its radioactive isotope power source. 

So why has NASA launched another Mars rover and what's so special about the many cameras it's taking for the ride? We've taken a closer look at its imaging tech – and some of it has a surprising amount in common with the earth-bound camera in your pocket... 

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Perseverance vs Curiosity: the camera upgrades

The Mars Perseverance Rover has the same Wall-E charm as the Curiosity, but the tech inside is very different. 

Curiosity has 17 cameras, Perseverance has 23, including four used to document the landing process, plus the parachute that will help this remarkable 'car' land safely. 

Later on we will dig into what these 23 cameras do, but the fundamental technical upgrades deserve some attention first. 

(Image credit: NASA)

Curiosity uses 1MP black-and-white cameras to capture the amazing images you can see posted regularly on the NASA website. On the other hand, Perseverance has 20MP full color sensors, much closer to the resolution of your phone or camera.

This means it can take photos without the multi exposure stitching method Curiosity uses. Some of its cameras also have wider-angle lenses, again letting it capture more of Mars’s landscape without panning. 

"Our previous Navcams would snap multiple pictures and stitch them together," says Colin McKinney of JPL, product delivery manager for one of Perseverance camera families. "With the wider field of view, we get the same perspective in one shot.”

Portrait mode on Mars

Why does the old Mars Rover have such low-res hardware, which seems old-school even for 2012?

Curiosity was in development long before it launched, obviously, but there was also the data rate to consider. You can’t simply Bluetooth or AirDrop photos from the surface of Mars to Florida. Even with Bluetooth 5.0.

NASA has mitigated this problem by using spacecraft in orbit around Mars as data relays. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter MAVEN and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter will support the Perseverance Rover in this way for two years, which is the initial period of its mission.

(Image credit: NASA)

Perseverance’s cameras also make much greater use of stereoscopy. This is where two cameras are placed near to each other, but with enough distance between that they have a slightly different view of a scene. Those differences are then analyzed to produce a 3D depth map that can distinguish near objects from far ones, and create three dimensional images. 

Many smartphones use the same technique for their 'Portrait' modes, which blur the background to emulate the effect of a wide aperture DSLR-style camera lens. For those of us who prefer to read NASA’s blog than take selfies, it means we can expect amazing high-resolution color 'first person' images from the surface of Mars that we can view through a virtual reality headset or Google Cardboard.

That’s not their real role, of course. The 23 cameras and two microphones are Perseverence’s eyes and ears. 

“It will sense the air around it, see and scan the horizon, hear the planet with microphones on the surface for the first time, feel it as it picks up samples to cache,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. 

These cameras can be split into a few categories. There are ones just to record the landing process which, if all goes well,  we can look forward to seeing on 18 February 2021. 

Then there are the navigation and hazard detection cameras, plus its 'science cameras'. These are the eyes for Perseverance’s investigational tools like its robotic arm. Let's take a closer look at how some of these work.

The Mars rover's head

The images that we’ll see from Perseverance are most likely to come from the equivalent of the rover's 'head', if this were a Pixar character. 

Two sets of 20MP Navcams sit at either side of the head on Perseverance’s main mast. These will be used by the team’s engineers to find safe paths for the Rover, and have the visual acuity to "spot a golf ball from 82 feet”, according to NASA.

This may be with the help of the Mastcam-Z units that sit right beside these 20MP “eyeball” cameras. 

(Image credit: NASA)

The 'Z' part stands for zoom. Two groups of zoom lens elements sit inside the barrel, providing focal lengths of 28-100mm, comparable with a great all-rounder DSLR lens. 

They can focus on objects just two meters away and their 7.4-micron pixel pitch is not far off that of the Sony Alpha A7S III (8.4 microns). 

Resolution is far lower, at 2MP (so a max 1600x1200 image size), but the combination of wide and zoom cameras gives Perseverance’s head unit an incredibly versatile view of its Martian surroundings. 

See that part above these cameras, which looks a little like a home cinema projector? This is the Perseverance’s SuperCam. Despite the exciting name, it’s not a traditional imaging camera. The SuperCam uses a laser to analyze rocks and soil, focusing on a target smaller than the nib of a pencil. 

(Image credit: NASA)

Perseverance also has two rows of wide-angle hazard cameras that let engineers see around the Rover’s feet. 

There are four of these cameras on front and two on the back.

You can think of these a little like the parking sensors of a car. They will see rocks and debris not visible to the cameras on the main mast, and can act as a guide to inform where to point the sensors on the robot arm. 

Elementary, my dear WATSON

NASA is not afraid of indulging in the odd geeky reference. WATSON and SHERLOC are two teams of hardware sensors on the Perseverance’s robotic arm. 

SHERLOC is a spectrometer that uses a deep ultraviolet laser to analyze objects on Mars’s surface, and is aided by the WATSON camera.

(Image credit: NASA)

This offers a wider, more eyeball-friendly view of what the highly focused SHERLOC sensors are looking at. 

NASA says WATSON is “almost identical” to the MAHLI camera used on the older Curiosity Rover. That is a 1600 x 1200 (2MP) camera with a magnifying glass-like field of view, used to look at objects as close as 18.3mm. It can also record 720p video. 

What's next for the NASA Mars Rover?

The Perseverance Rover will land in Mars’s Jezero Crater, which has a diameter of 49km. This spot was chosen because it is believed to be the site of what was once a body of water. 

“The only way that could form geometrically was for it to be a lake,” NASA planetary scientist Dr. Caleb Fassett told the NY Times. 

Night-time temperatures in the crater drop to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 Celsius), so we're hoping the aptly-named Perseverance has taken a coat.

The rover will stay for “at least one Mars year”, which is worth just under two of our Earth years, searching for signs of microbial life, and collecting soil and samples. These will be stored in sealed tubes. Another camera is used here too – the CacheCam looks down the tube as Martian material is collected, to record the process. 

One final bit of exciting tech is that Rover will also carry a helicopter drone, known as Ingenuity. It will be the “first aircraft to attempt control flight on another planet”. And thanks to transmission delays, what limited directions it is given by the engineers will have been programmed-in long before the flight actually takes place. 

Perseverance is a 1,025kg, 3-meter long, $2.4 billion space car. Let’s hope it makes its way to Mars safely. 

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Apple surged over 10 percent to a record high on Friday after reporting blockbuster quarterly results, helping the iPhone maker eclipse Saudi Aramco to become the world's most valuable publicly listed company.

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A 17-year-old Florida boy masterminded the hacking of celebrity accounts on Twitter, including those of US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, officials said on Friday.

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Microsoft could reenergise its advertising business with a huge supply of video if it follows through on acquiring TikTok's US operations from ByteDance.

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In an unprecedented move for the company, Apple has confirmed it has a new iPhone coming in 2020. It's not all good news though; the company has confirmed it'll be out later in the year than it has previously "launched" its flagship phones.

Apple didn’t specifically call the device the iPhone 12, but this has essentially confirmed the new iPhone range we expected to launch in September will be delayed until at least some point later in 2020.

When will you be able to buy yourself a brand new iPhone? Plus, when will the company be unveiling its new devices? Those are two different things, and below we're going to try and give you the best answers to those questions we have so far.

What’s happened?

During Apple’s Q3 2020 earning call, Apple CFO Luca Maestri specifically referred to a new iPhone and clarified that the company is expecting its launch to be delayed in 2020 when compared to previous years.

Maestri said, “As you know, last year we started selling iPhones in late September. This year, we expect supply to be available a few weeks later.”

This is unheard of as Apple has never previously commented on the existence of a new iPhone, but the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the company’s financials – and future financials with an iPhone 12 delay on the horizon – have changed things a little.

Later, Maestri clarified “I said in my remarks that a year ago we launched new iPhone in late September. And I said that this year, the supply of the new product will be a few weeks later than that.”

That may seem simple at first, but Apple’s terminology here has been very specifically chosen and it may not impact the time that you get to see the company unveil the iPhone 12 range announced on stage.

When did we expect the iPhone 12? 

The iPhone 11 Pro Max from 2019 (Image credit: Future)

September 8 was the best guess for the iPhone 12 announcement. That was leaked by an established tipster called ihacktu, and it matches what we’ve previously seen from the company is other years.

Typically, Apple announces its new iPhone on a Tuesday at the start of September. It's usually the first or second week of the year. It then often puts the device on sale 10 days after that, with pre-orders happening in that period between announcement and on sale.

Maestri’s wording is specifically about the time you can buy the new iPhone.

He referred to “the supply of the new product”, which means this is Apple specifically commenting about the on-sale date of the new iPhone 12. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see the iPhone 12 announced any later in the year.

We’ve seen a similar situation with the iPhone X in 2017. The handset was designed to be a reinvention of Apple’s devices and it launched on September 12 alongside the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, but wasn’t on sale until November 3 of the same year.

Apple never publicly commented on why that phone came out later, but it’s thought it was to do with supply chain issues where Apple wasn’t able to get one element of the device for the manufacturing process to take place.

That’s similar to the effect that the iPhone 12 is sure to suffer this year. That's owing to factories and manufacturing plants around the world closing and reopening throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple may also want to delay the release of the phone to try and coincide with the end of the pandemic. Apple stores across the US are currently shut, and in other countries many are having to limit the amount of customers.

A new iPhone often brings a fervor of excitement in physical stores as well as online sales, so it may be the company wishes to limit that impact by pushing the release date of its phones back a few weeks.

So, what does this actually change? 

It may change the date you can buy the new iPhone 12 series, but it's not certain that this means it'll change the time when it’s announced. 

If Apple follows a similar schedule to 2017 with the iPhone X, the company may decide to keep an early September event for unveiling its new iPhone. Instead, the delay would impact when you're able to buy the product, not when you find out about it.

It seems the phones will be delayed until October at the earliest. If Tuesday, September 8 for an announcement is correct, then that would mean we would have expected the devices to go on sale on September 18 in a normal iPhone cycle.

Maestri’s terminology of “a few” weeks suggests that is pushed back by at least three weeks. That likely means you won’t be able to buy the phone until October 9, or perhaps even later in the year.

How certain is any of this? 

None of this is certain. This is all conjecture that we’re able to suggest based on previous iPhone launches and Apple's specific way of announcing this, but these are strange times with the world trying to cope with Covid-19. 

September is still a month away, so things may even change within Apple HQ to see a longer delay. We likely won't know more until we hear directly from Apple on its plans for an event in September, if it's set to happen.

If it does happen, we'll be sure to be one of the first to let you know.

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Facebook on Friday added licensed music videos to the social network in the US, challenging YouTube for the attention of online audiences.

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The best meal kit delivery service for 2020: Home Chef, Sun Basket, Blue Apron and more - CNET

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No-fuss, oven-ready meal kits.

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OLOy MD4U322616DJDA 64GB DDR4 RAM - $180.00 at Amazon
(£229.99/roughly AU$250)
Sister publication Tom's Hardware has drawn our attention to this seriously cheap 64GB RAM module from a company called OLOy. Upgrading to a dual channel setup is a great way to instantly improve performance, so grab it while you can!View Deal

We've never come across OLOy-branded memory before, but the two-year-old company is said to have consistently delivered some of the cheapest RAM modules on the market.

An investigation carried out by our sister publication Tom's Hardware earlier this year found that the company used industry standard ICs.

“We liked the OLOy WarHawk memory we tested, because of its great overclocking capability and high speeds. In all of our tests the WarHawk either kept pace with or outright bested competitors such as the Adata Spectrix D80 and Patriot Viper Steel," wrote Thomas Sodestrom.

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Amazon is selling a 64GB kit called the OLOy MD4U322616DJDA (two 32GB DDR4 RAM 2666MHz, CL16-18-18-36, 288-pin, PC4 21000) for $180/£229.99/around AU$250 - that’s a 5% discount on the suggested retail price (and 10% less than at Newegg).

It's only available in black and doesn’t have any fancy RGB lights, but the memory chips are covered with nice looking heatsinks and the memory modules come with a lifetime warranty.

Overclocking with these is likely to be hit and miss, but compatibility - both with AMD and Intel platforms - is almost certainly guaranteed.

Adding memory, especially in pairs, means that you can instantaneously improve your system performance, particularly if you are upgrading from less than 16GB capacity on a single memory slot. Moving to what experts call a dual channel setup will improve the total amount of memory bandwidth available to your system and make everything feel much snappier.

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Bear in mind

• If Amazon does not ship this product to your region, you may have to take advantage of a specialist parcel forwarding service to take advantage of the deal.
• If you've managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications, in stock and brand new, let us know and we'll tip our hat to you.

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